"Awesome is a floating and tiling window manager. It's extremely fast, small, dynamic and awesome. Windows can be managed in several layouts: tiled, maximized, dwindle, spiral, floating... Each layout can be applied on the fly, optimizing the environment for the application in use and the task performed. Managing windows in tiled mode assures that no space will be wasted on your screen. No gaps, no overlap. Other layouts can be used for different purpose. If you do not want to use the tiling management, you can use the floating layout wich will let you organize your windows as you wish, like any other window manager." Version 2.3-final has been released today.

Awesome is really, er, awesome. It's one of the few tiling wm's that has really good xrandr support. My only complaint is that so far, they seem to change the layout and options of the configuration file with each release, which makes updating a config file to a new version kind of a PITA.

I think if you are more of a console/terminal person, or more of a keyboard person, then tiling wm's are much, much faster to use. The ability to quickly split, move, resize, float, etc. windows, and move 'em from one screen to the other, all without having to move a finger from the keyboard is, no pun intended, awesome.

For years, I used fluxbox, openbox, and some Xfce, but in the last couple of years, I have moved almost exclusively to tiling wm's and my speed and productivity have soared.

Tiling wm's are definitely not for everybody. They are probably not for most people. But if you are a keyboard kind of person, they rock.

Not everybody want eye candy. Terminal command and apps are much faster than gui if you masterise them. And if you masterise them, you dont want to use GUI anymore. That all. It is a choice, most people want gui, other want tiled WM, ultra fast application command line everywhere.

As it is a fork of a suckless apps, let talk like them:

<imitation of the suckless philosophy>

The last kind of user are power user, other are not being part of the elite, are noob and are not the target for these product. If you are not are power user, it is your problem.

Dude, a window manager and Linux has as much in common as pig and salami. People who use this kind of stuff do it intentionally to attack the idea of desktop itself; desktops are for lamers^W beginners.

I agree with the poor selection of screenshots though as people who are really into this will laugh at wallpapers and transparent terminals. But everybody learns eventually; I salute the developer for this much awfulness.

It could be nice to see some tiling window manager features be implemented in bigger desktop environments (KDE, Xfce, Gnome) too and in their window managers. Maybe as extra add-on software if not integrated into their default window managers?

You can use xmonad as the underlying window manager for Gnome or KDE. It's a keyboard-controllable tiling window manager extensible in Haskell. There are - as might be expected - some rough spots as far as interaction goes, but it seems to work pretty well. With a full DE you do lose some of the low footprint benefit that most people are looking for fit these window managers, but you gain back the benefits of app integration, especially with KDE.

I know that before I started using a tiling wm I didn't really 'get it' either. But seriously, if you do a lot of dev work then a tiling wm will probably make you more productive.

Not having title bars, getting to use all of my screen real estate, not having to use the mouse... really is a great thing. Also, compared to the bulk of the tiling wms out there, awesome's configuration file is really simple to understand.

One of the gotchas with awesome deals with the way XToolkit/XAWT Java applications are handled. You might end up getting a gray screen. There are a few workarounds, but most tiling window managers have this issue. stumpwm doesn't. So if you are a java dev and want to try out a tiling wm check out stumpwm.

I don't like the idea of having to upgrade my machine every time a new fancy-smanshy desktop is released. Going to tiling wm route is an easy way to prolong the use of your hardware. You can put your system resources to work processing applications instead of rendering GUI widgets.

First I discovered screen and I really liked it. Then, somewhere, I read "ratpoison tries to be screen for X Window" and in no time I tried it and was hooked.
Then I realized it's far too limiting and a hindrance for some workflows, so I set out to look for a replacement, but it had to be a tiling manager.
Then I tried dwm and liked it, but was put off by it's ridiculous configuration system (or lack thereof).

Then I jumped to awesome and did NOT like the keys at first. Then I learned them and am now absolutely happy with my experience on this computer. I finally use Linux as my main computer again.

I have one Windows workstation, business related. I was frustrated because of lack of tools at first, so I installed FreeBSD in an emulator on top of it. I slowly moved most of the stuff into the emulator, and it became the main way I interface with this and all the other machines there. And it has a tiling WM, almost Awesome

I'd like to reverse the host/client situation but I'm not sure how VisualStudio would work in QEMU.